The Asset Strippers

Mike Nelson’s The Asset Strippers installed at Tate Britain. The show is made up of reclaimed, discarded, and auctioned farm and industrial equipment which the artist has made into sculpture in the Duveen Galleries.

The Asset Strippers by Mike Nelson at Tate Britain feels both like you are on the moon for the first time, whilst also seeing the 20th century and its old ways dying and decaying in front of your eyes. Mechanisation rots away.

Nelson bought massive, multi-tonne machinery pieces from auctions and has displayed them in Tate Britain. THey sit silently on plinths made of concrete or wood pallets. Dust has begun to settle on these massive industrial weaving machines, some still sticky with grease or oil in its joints and gears. Steel and lead giants that used to thread zippers onto clothes or tassle onto jackets sit quietly in the Duveen Galleries, zippers and tassles still quietly enmeshed in machines. I felt so tiny amongst these machines. It’s amazing stuff that is totally and beautifully sculptural — no one could have arranged these hulking beasts quite as beautifully as Nelson. THey are on a knife-edge between utility and art. Relics of England’s industrial heyday, repurposed.

Installation view of the Tate Britain exhibition in the Duveen Galleries.